The TASSC memo continued:
Some issues our European colleagues suggest include:
• Global warming
• Nuclear waste disposal
• Diseases and pests in agricultural products for transborder trade
• Biotechnology
• Eco-labeling for EC products
• Food processing and packaging
It’s worth looking at these tactics because they suggest a high degree of sophistication and a willingness to underwrite an ambitious and expensive “grassroots” campaign. First, APCO suggested that TASSC target secondary markets, because this would “avoid cynical reporters from major cities [and involved] less reviewing/challenging of TASSC messages.” It’s a judgment call whether big-city reporters are by definition cynical. But it’s pretty clear that they are, as a group, better educated, better informed, and more likely to be briefed on specific areas of science. Small-town papers and broadcast outlets tend to have fewer journalists in total and fewer specialists. They also pay less, so there is an incentive for the best reporters to get their early experience in smaller markets and then move up to the high-paying big-city jobs. The public relations professionals at APCO know this, so you have to read more critically when the plan they wrote for TASSC recommends targeting small towns. The 1993 memo “The Revised Plan for the Public Launching of TASSC” suggests that a secondary-market focus “ . . . increases [the] likelihood of pick-up by media” and “limit[s] potential for counterattack. The likely opponents of TASSC tend to concentrate their efforts in the top markets while skipping the secondary markets.” It seems fair to conclude that this is APCO’s way of saying that TASSC should try to stay under the radar.
APCO also recommended that TASSC establish a public information bureau that would brief “pertinent associations” in Washington, D.C., and coordinate with “organizations that have tangential goals to TASSC, such as . . . The Science and Environmental Policy Project.” (The latter is another Astroturf group established by a tobacco-sponsored scientist named Dr. S. Fred Singer—more about him later.) The name “public information bureau” sounds benign, like an informational clearinghouse that perhaps would send out the odd news release or be at the ready to answer questions. Certainly APCO anticipated sending out information, but the specific list of proposed activities and tactics suggested something much more proactive—and much more political. The list included:
• Publishing and distributing a monthly update report for all TASSC members, which will quantify media impressions made the prior month and discuss new examples of unsound science.
• Monitoring the trade press (e.g., public interest group newsletters and activities) and informing TASSC members of any upcoming studies and relevant news.
• Arranging media tours.
• Issuing news releases on a regular basis to news wire services, members, allies and targeted reporters.
• Acting as a clearinghouse for speaking requests of TASSC scientists or other members and maintaining a Speakers Bureau to provide speakers for allies and interested groups.
• Drafting “boilerplate” speeches, press releases and op-eds [opinion page articles] to be used by TASSC field representatives.
• Placing articles/op-eds in trade publications to serve as a member recruitment tool in targeted industries, such as the agriculture, chemical, food additive and biotechnology fields.
• Monitoring the field and serving as a management central command for any crises that occur.
• Developing visual elements that help explain some of the issues behind unsound science.6
Here again, APCO was advising that TASSC look for every opportunity to attack inconvenient (“unsound”) science. It wanted TASSC to identify “targeted reporters” who would be most likely to give the kind of coverage that served TASSC’s purposes. It suggested the drafting of “boilerplate” speeches and press releases of the kind that could be used again and again to promote its messages. And the op-eds could come in especially handy, again, in the secondary markets. As any big public relations firm (or would-be thought leader) knows, it’s hard as can be to get the New York Times to publish your opinion piece. But if you are satisfied to send lots of copies to lots of smaller papers, many of which find it much harder to source a steady supply of good material, you have a reasonable chance of reaching just as many readers.
TASSC’s early membership list included “sound science” supporters like Amoco, Exxon, Occidental Petroleum, Santa Fe Pacific Gold Corporation, Procter & Gamble, the Louisiana Chemical Association, the National Pest Control Association, General Motors, 3M, Chevron, and Dow Chemical. For “science advisors,” they had people such as Frederick Seitz.
In the 1960s and ‘70s, Seitz was a widely admired scientist, a former president of both the National Academy of Sciences and Rockefeller University. In 1978 he took that reputation to work for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. According to “While Washington Slept,” a May 2006 Vanity Fair article by investigative journalist Mark Hertsgaard, over a ten-year period Seitz was responsible for handing out US$45 million in tobacco money to people who were pursuing research that overwhelmingly failed to link tobacco to anything the least bit negative. Seitz later admitted to accepting almost US$900,000 of that money himself.
But by the late 1980s he seemed to have lost a step. In a Philip Morris interoffice memo dated 1989, an executive named Alexander Holtzman reported that he was told that “Dr. Seitz is quite elderly and not sufficiently rational as to offer advice.”7 Yet Seitz continued to stand as a TASSC regular, in particular lending his name and leveraging his old National Academy of Sciences affiliation to the global warming denial movement for nineteen more years, dying in 2008 at the age of ninety-six.
It’s probably time to introduce Steven Milloy, a.k.a. “The Junkman,” to our cast of characters. While TASSC was originally run by executive director Garrey Carruthers, an economist and former New Mexico governor, Steven Milloy took over in 1997. Milloy’s academic background is also considerable: he has an undergraduate degree in science from Johns Hopkins, a masters in health sciences and biostatistics (also from Johns Hopkins), and a masters in law from Georgetown. But there is no record of his directly pursuing science or law as a career.
Instead, Milloy emerged in the 1990s working for a series of public relations and lobby firms, including the EOP Group, which the Web site PR Watch.org describes as “a well-connected, Washington-based lobby firm whose clients have included the American Crop Protection Association (the chief trade association of the pesticide industry), the American Petroleum Institute, AT&T, the Business Roundtable, the Chlorine Chemistry Council, Dow Chemical Company, Edison Electric Institute (nuclear power), Fort Howard Corp. (a paper manufacturer), International Food Additives Council, Monsanto Co., National Mining Association, and the Nuclear Energy Institute.” 8
Milloy, who is currently an “adjunct scholar” at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and formerly held that position at the Cato Institute, is also the creator and proprietor of the Web site JunkScience.com, which works to “debunk” everything from the dangers of secondhand smoke to the risks of genetically modified foods. Milloy was a founding member of a team assembled by the American Petroleum Institute (API) to create a 1998 “Global Climate Science Communication Action Plan” (the precise contents of which Greenpeace later discovered and made available for public viewing).9 The API made no bones about its intent in creating its plan for the public. The document plainly states that its purpose is to convince the public, through the media, that climate science is awash in uncertainty. Notwithstanding that the industry’s